HMS Professor of Pathology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Core Faculty-Wyss Institute
HM News: One year in, where do we stand with diagnostics compared to where we were last year?
Walt: There’s been a huge amount of progress with diagnostics. At the beginning, what the public and perhaps many in the field didn’t fully realize was the gargantuan amount of testing that’s required to keep a global pandemic in check. We needed on the order of three times the total installed diagnostic testing capacity in the world at the time.
There were a lot of frustrations with respect to how fast things came online. But you have to understand, there weren’t any diagnostic tests for COVID-19 back when the pandemic hit. The fact that we even had molecular tools like RT-PCR and reagents to detect the virus is a testament to how much science and technology have advanced over the past several decades.